The two figures stand at the top of the
hill and survey the desolate winter landscape, still and silent under
the full moon. In front of them is a smaller hill. The man they
are trailing has just begun his descent towards the frozen lake less
than a hundred yards beyond.

Nothing else is moving in this
lonely place. The snow has
just stopped, leaving a thin, pristine blanket as far as the eye can
see; the wind is creating small flurries in the baleful light.
Now the two men walk slowly down into the small depression between the
hills, temporarily losing sight of their quarry. They become
aware of a strange intermittent whistling sound which can be heard
above the wind, interrupted by a sudden, hideous scream. As they
crest the brow of the new hill, they are stunned to see the inert form
of the man they have been following lying at the edge of the
snow-covered lake. Their eyes scour the landscape, from the slope
of the hill down to the distant clumps of lakeside trees dimly visible
in both directions. The only footprints that can be seen on land
or lake are those forming a lone trail leading to the sprawling figure,
evidently made by the victim himself; everywhere else there is powdery
snow. They hasten down towards the lake, creating fresh tracks of
their own. Reaching the body, they turn it over: the man has been
stabbed through the heart. But there is no weapon to be seen,
either on the surrounding ground or on the surface of the adjacent
lake, where the flurries of snow are still dancing in the wind…

For those who
yearn for the Golden Age of
detective fiction and in particular for the classic “locked rooms” of
John Dickson Carr, take heart: only the lack of a publisher stands
between you and new-found happiness! Paul Halter, a
forty-something Frenchman, has donned the mantle of the great JDC and
has to date produced twenty-nine novels and a collection of short
stories, all replete with cunning clues, brain-twisting puzzles and
always “fair play” solutions. All in the grand manner … and all
in French.

Paul Halter
first came to prominence in
1987 when he won the Prix de Cognac, given for detective
literature, with his first published novel La Quatrieme Porte (The Fourth Door). The
following year he received one of the highest accolades in French
mystery literature, the Prix du Roman d’Aventures, for Le Brouillard Rouge (The Red Fog). The first novel
introduced M. Halter’s principal series detective, Dr. Alan Twist, a
tall, thin, pipe-smoking Englishman in his late fifties, aided and
abetted by the rambunctious Chief Inspector Archibald Hurst of Scotland
Yard in whose lap seem to fall every impossible crime in the country,
the country in question being England.

For, although Paul Halter hails from
France, the vast majority of his novels are situated in England –
because he feels it has a unique atmosphere, and because his
beloved Carr and Christie both set the majority of their stories
there. M. Halter, who was born in 1956 in Haguenau, Alsace (a
region which for most of its history was a pawn in the Franco-German
wars), dreamed initially of becoming a poet. That all changed
when, as a teenager, he discovered Carr’s He Who Whispers and became
immediately captivated by the locked-room genre, quickly devouring
everything by Carr then available in French. Already writing
stories for his own gratification, he nevertheless recognized that it
was not a paying career and decided to train as an electronics
engineer. Despite being, by continental standards, a best-selling
author, it is still to this day necessary for him to augment his income
as a writer by working part-time at communications giant France
Telecom. Crime – at least Golden Age crime – doesn’t pay.

His first published novel, The Fourth Door, takes place in the
late1940’s in a small English village, on the outskirts of which looms
the sinister and forbidding Darnley House where, twenty years before,
the lady of the mansion was found hideously slashed in a locked attic
room. Since that time, mysterious noises emanating from the attic
have driven every tenant away, until the arrival of a spiritualist
couple who claim to be able to reach the deceased in the afterworld.

One of them decides to encounter the lost
spirit by spending the night in the infamous room, which is sealed with
wax bearing the imprint of a rare coin selected only minutes beforehand
by one of the observers. When the seals are broken, the dead body
of a stranger lies in the barren room, a dagger in its back. The
window, of course, had been locked from within. Later, a second
victim is found shot point-blank in an otherwise empty house,
surrounded by virgin snow. Once again, the elusive murderer has
found a way to vanish without trace….

One of the protagonists is a prodigal son
obsessed with Houdini and his escape routines; he is seen at the same
instant by two witnesses one hundred miles apart. And that’s just
the first half of the book. Needless to say, Dr. Twist finds a
perfectly rational explanation for everything.

The Red Fog
is a more complex tale
with undercurrents of Edgar Allan Poe, set in Victorian times and hence
with a different detective. It starts with a typical Halter
brain-twister: a magician has claimed to a group of young girls that he
can conjure up a ghost. A makeshift theater has been created by
curtaining off one end of a large room in the top floor of the rambling
country house. The girls sit in chairs and sofas in one part of
the room while the magician opens or lifts up each of the articles of
furniture on stage to show that nobody else is there. The
curtains close; there is a cry and a thud; and when the curtains are
drawn back moments later, the magician is lying there stabbed to death.

The puzzle is actually solved halfway
through the novel, but by that time the perpetrator has fled, and it is
at that point that the Jack-the-Ripper murders start in London, the
dark shadows form, and the story becomes decidedly more gruesome….

Just as Carr had two principal detectives,
so too does Paul Halter. Owen Burns is a moneyed dilettante who
lives in the London of the early 1900’s (and who seems to be based on
none other than Oscar Wilde). He, too, specializes in impossible
crimes, the more the merrier, solved inevitably with verve, grace, and
good humor. In one of my personal favorites, Les Sept Merveilles du Crime (The Seven Wonders of Crime), Burns
tracks down a disarmingly demented killer who perpetrates no less than
seven “impossible crimes” before being caught; in Les Douze Crimes de Hercules (The Twelve Crimes of Hercules) he
unmasks the perpetrator of a dozen crimes, about half of which are
seemingly impossible – even the prolific M. Halter can’t string a dozen
together in one book.

The extract at the beginning of this
article is liberally adapted from another Burns book: Le Roi du Desordre (The Lord of Misrule). Halter
has also set several of his books in ancient times, explaining among
other things, how the Minotaur was slain!

I make no claims that Paul
Halter is a master stylist in the manner of a Ruth Rendell or a
Reginald Hill: the development of in-depth characterizations is
not crucial to his stories. What Halter does do is to deliver
cracking yarns loaded with dark menace, whole shoals of red herring,
and, above all, diabolical puzzles worthy of The Master in his
prime. Indeed, what is striking to those of us who felt that Carr
had just about mined every possible locked-room seam – and whose later
books seemed frankly bereft of new ideas – is the freshness and
originality of Halter’s riddles.

It is no mean feat to create thirty or
more puzzles worthy of Carr that the maestro himself never
imagined. Furthermore, Halter, while every bit Carr’s rival in
the creation of eerie atmosphere, is closer to today’s writers in his
willingness to incorporate gore and horror more explicitly in his
stories.

As for M. Halter himself, he stands as one
of the very few authors prepared to defend the Golden Age banner, for
which he offers no apology, cost him what it may. As Dr. Twist
says in A 139 Pas de la Mort (139 Steps from Death):
“The mystery novel has become the
vehicle
for a social message and for exploring humanitarian and philosophical
issues. It is almost indispensable these days to portray the
police as corrupt and the murderer as the innocent victim of
fate… There’s never any doubt about the identity of the villain:
it’s always ‘society’. And all that, of course, while wallowing
in the most stupefying utopianism.” Is this defiance of the modern
trend the reason why Paul Halter’s works, which have been translated
into German, Italian, and Japanese, haven’t yet been published in
English? Possibly. There has been no revival of interest in
Carr’s work in the U.S. as there was in France in the 1980s, from which
M. Halter undoubtedly benefited. And, despite the success of the JONATHAN CREEK impossible-crime
series on British television, none of Carr’s work has been reprinted in
the U.K. for many years.

Nevertheless, two of Halter’s short
stories have made it into print here: one, “The Call of the Lorelei,”
appeared in the July 2004 Ellery
Queen Mystery Magazine, and a second, “The Tunnel of Death,” is
due to appear in the March/April 2005 double issue. Both are part
of a collection of eight stories entitled The Night of the Wolf, seven of
which are “locked room.” Bob Adey, the undisputed guru of the
genre – who gave generously of his time to work closely with me on the
translations via the Internet and transatlantic phone – calls the
stories “little gems,” and says of Halter: “Not only does he come up
with ingenious solutions, but he has a marvelous talent for inventing
completely new impossible crime situations.”

Ed Hoch, the astonishingly prolific master
of the impossible-crime short story, says: “As Paul Halter’s stories
begin reaching American readers in EQMM and elsewhere, I think they’ll
discover a combination of baffling mystery and eerie atmosphere not
encountered since the glory days of John Dickson Carr. One of my
great pleasures this year was reading English translations of eight
Halter stories in a collection which I hope will find an American
publisher soon.” Is it too much to hope that some enterprising
independent publisher will take the risk of swimming against the tide?

As for the novels, The
Fourth Door [La Quarta Porta
in Italian] has
already been translated into English, but it has not yet found a
publisher “because the characters lack depth” according to one.
Undeterred by this, work has nonetheless commenced on two more, all
with M. Halter’s active and enthusiastic encouragement.
Anglophile that he is, he dreams of the day he can see his works appear
in English the world over.

This
article and bibliography
first appeared in Mystery*File
47, February
2005.

PAUL HALTER: FOUR REVIEWS, by John Pugmire For those of you interested in
learning more about
Paul Halter, I offer four reviews, each of which
represents a different aspect of his recent work:

Le
Crime
de Dedale: Daedalus’
crime was killing the Minotaur. (You thought it was Theseus
whodunit? According to Halter, Daedalus – the da Vinci of ancient
Crete – got there first!) He declares he will slay the creature
while he himself is locked in another room of Minos’
palace. The Minotaur is kept in a room in a sunken chamber, down
steps at the bottom of which is a door to which Minos himself has the
only key. The chamber has an open roof around which are stationed four soldiers under orders to survey
the proceedings whenever
Minos is down there. Minos leads Daedalus down to check the
Minotaur is alive and returns him to his room. When Minos again
leads Daedalus down, he finds the Minotaur’s
throat has been cut.

The solution is
completely without precedent, to my
knowledge, and is brilliantly simple: as in Maskelyne’s
celebrated walking-through-the-wall illusion, what appears to be the
biggest impediment is in fact the key to the whole effect. (Footnote). This book
is probably the best of Halter’s
several excursions into the Ancient World, the others being Le Geant de Pierre (The Stone Giant) and Le Chemin de la Lumiere (The Path of Light), in each of
which a present-day group of adventurers attempts to solve a mystery of
the past from archaeological clues and the sections of the story
alternate between past and present.

Les Sept
Merveilles du Crime (The
Seven
Wonders of Crime) –
which I am halfway through translating –
is set in 1905 London and features Owen Burns with Inspector Wedekind
as the police foil. A seemingly demented killer is sending
paintings with warning notices containing clues concerning impending
murders, each of which is linked in some way to a Wonder of the Ancient
World, and each of which, when it occurs, turns out to have been
impossible to commit: a lighthouse keeper is set aflame in the
middle of a raging storm which prevents all access, an archer is felled
by a shot from such a distance that proper aiming was out of the
question, a man dies in a pergola surrounded by a sea of mud, etc.,
etc.

It is an
astonishing feat to concoct seven entirely
distinct and original impossible crimes – at
least four of which are top drawer –
within the covers of one book (the nearest competitor being Pierre
Boileau with Six Crimes Sans Assassin
which did have some repetition in the murders.) This may be my
favorite Halter: the rapidly-moving plot, while containing the usual
high content of twists and turns, is not quite as frenetic as The Fourth Door (with an impossible
crime every third chapter, it doesn’t
need to be) and the character development is better. The effete
Burns – a
more fully-developed character than Twist – is torn between his
instincts as an investigator
and his admiration for the ‘artistic’
(i.e murderous) abilities of the perpetrator. The identity of the
latter comes as a true surprise, and the conclusion, every bit as
extraordinary as the sequence of crimes, wraps everything up very
satisfyingly.

Le
Tigre
Borgne (The One-Eyed Tiger).
As Bob Adey has observed, Paul Halter’s
genius lies not only in finding ingenious solutions, but in first
dreaming up the impossible situations to be solved. Nowhere is
this more evident than in Le Tigre
Borgne, set in the British Raj of the 1870’s.
A prince’s life has been
threatened and he is due to die at midnight. He has taken refuge
in a room at the top of his palace set in a crocodile-infested
lake. There is no window in the room except for a viewing
aperture three feet wide and one foot high. His only companion is
a pet rat. The room is accessed from a courtyard guarded by a
baby elephant, but to reach it one must pass through three doors, the
first of which is a massive external door whose bolts are so stiff the
strongest man can neither knock it down, nor move the bolts by reaching
through the tiny side window. At the top of the stairs is an
ante-chamber, also with a locked door. Finally, the internal
bronze door to the prince’s
room has a lock for which only one copy of the key exists, which is
always on the royal person.

A squad of
hand-picked royal guards patrols the
perimeter of the palace at a frequency which makes it impossible to
climb the sheer walls of the palace without detection. A larger
squad patrols the banks of the lake. And, just in case all the
foregoing is too easy, there’s
another tower thirty feet away in the lake, from the top of which a
limited view into the prince’s
room is possible. A witness perched there sees a scuffle between
two figures, one of which then vanishes, and the prince’s
body is found with a knife in its back shortly thereafter. Every
door is, of course, locked on the inside.

The story starts
very slowly, but once the
impossibilities are gradually unveiled the pace picks up and, hard as
it may be to envisage, there really is a ‘fair-play’
solution. Oh, and Halter also throws in a solution to the Indian
rope trick as a bonus…

Les
Larmes de Sibyl(Sibyl's Tears),
doesn’t contain any ‘locked-room’
puzzles per se, but the events therein do nevertheless appear to be
almost impossible, and to solve the mystery requires all the skills Dr.
Twist – accompanied by
the irascible Hurst – can
bring to bear. A gifted psychic suddenly appears in a Cornish
village in search of Sibyl’s
Tears, the name given by the locals to a hidden
spring in the forest caused, legend has it, by tears from the legendary
soothsaying sprite Sibyl. When challenged to use his powers to
solve a crime committed several years beforehand, he describes clues
which he himself doesn’t
understand, but which nonetheless lead to discovery of the body.
After that amazing success, he is asked to help with two other unsolved
mysteries, with the same results. Before he has the chance to
apply his psychic prowess to a fourth, he is murdered.

The pacing and
character development are deftly
handled and the reader is constantly wrong-footed by Halter, who
juggles the several suspects in a masterly fashion before
producing a stunning denouement. With this book, he demonstrates he can not only write excellent
stories in the Carr
tradition, but is capable of work reminiscent of some of the best of
Christie. Footnote:
I can explain the Maskelyne trick for anyone who doesn’t
know it. It’s one of
the all-time greats and diabolically clever.

PostScript:
I
understand
that La Ruelle Fantome will
be published next month (November 2005), and that henceforth the Burns
stories will be published by Labor and the Twist stories by Le
Masque. Tout se complique.

***

UPDATE [11-30-07].
Since this article first appeared there have been a number of novels
published in French and a collection

of ten short stories, The
Night of the Wolf, has appeared in English (Wildside Press,
2006). See below. For the latest information, please visit www.paulhalter.com.

Short stories in English:
add “The Night of the Wolf” EQMM,
May 2006
and “The
Robber’s Grave” EQMM, June
2007
and
another story in EQMM,
sometime in 2008.

The Night of the Wolf,
the 2006 collection of 10 short stories, received the following
critical acclaim: a Publisher’s
Weekly starred review, a EQMM four-star review, and was
nominated for a Barry Award.